There is nothing “natural” about the alleged inferiority of women. The subjugation of women has always been inseparably connected to class society, is maintained by class society, and cannot be resolved as a special question until classes are abolished.
The subjugation of women is necessary in class society for the maintenance of private wealth and inheritable private property. Engels said of the first appearance of monogamous marriage in history, ”The sole exclusive aim of the monogamous marriage was to make the man supreme in the family, and to propagate as the future heir to his wealth, children indisputably his own.” The laws defending private property have a super-structural effect on all classes. “The modern industrial family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife.”
The emancipation of women is inseparably tied up with their awakening and revolutionization. In this process special emphasis must be placed on the triple oppression of national minority working women, as workers, as women, and as national minorities.
Women, along with all other class conscious workers, must be brought into the front ranks to lead in the struggle to:
1. Abolish the private ownership of the land and factories which will transfer the means of production from private ownership to social ownership, thereby doing away with the single family as an economic unit and creating the conditions under a socialist society for equality in marriage based on mutual inclination and not economics.
2. Pass from individual petty domestic economy, private household labor to large scale social economy and guarantee the participation of women in general productive labor. Equal opportunity does not mean that women must be exactly the same as men in productivity, duration, amount of, or condition of labor.
3. Abolish laws that discriminate against women and grant privileges to men. Develop the consciousness of men and women as to the reactionary customs and traditions that perpetuate the bourgeois ideology of male supremacy and oppose that ideology with proletarian ideology.
4. Participate and organize struggles of the working class and bring political class consciousness that will move the working women from the position of reserves to the active front line fighters for the working class.
5. Strive to bring the entire women’s movement to the side of the proletarian revolution.
Our Party demands and sets out to lead the struggle for:
1. Unemployment compensation commensurate with the number of children to extend to all unemployed workers, including those now on welfare.
2. Recognition and protection of the rights of women, equal pay for equal work.
3. Equal rights in all spheres: economic, social, political and legal.
4. Free 24 hour child care for all working parents.